Sognevo

Gala

gala, Old Norse: to crow, to shriek, to sing.

A free and open-source vocal processor that turns a dry screamed take into a finished black metal vocal, built with JUCE. Sibling of Galdr.

Download Source on GitHub

VST3CLAPAU (macOS)StandaloneWindowsmacOSLinux

The Gala GUI: a dark-fantasy themed vocal processor interface
The GUI: dark-fantasy themed, resizable, with tooltips.

Download

Checking the latest release on GitHub…

Features

  • One chain from dry scream to finished vocal, in signal order: input, gate, de-esser, formants, drive, doubler, ambience, output
  • Input stage with gain, optional mono sum and a 12 dB/oct high-pass
  • Gate / downward expander with hysteresis, hold, sidechain high-pass and up to 5 ms of lookahead, reported to the host as latency
  • Split-band de-esser ahead of the drive (saturation amplifies sibilance), with listen mode
  • Four-band formant bank: a morph control glides across A-E-I-O-U targets, a shift control scales every centre 0.5×-2× without touching pitch, and each band offers frequency, Q and gain on top of the morphed target
  • Multistage drive with Galdr's four flavours (soft, hard, fold, grim), bias for asymmetric clipping and even harmonics, tilt EQ before and after, automatic level compensation and 4× oversampling
  • Three-voice doubler: randomized 8-40 ms delays, up to ±30 cents of warble, per-voice band-passing, stereo spread and a fully mono-safe width control
  • Ducked ambience: a tempo-syncable delay with filtered feedback and a short cavern reverb built on Galdr's FDN, both pushed down by the dry vocal so the tail blooms only between phrases
  • Latency-aligned global dry/wet and a click-free, latency-compensated bypass
  • Gain-reduction meters on gate, de-esser and ducking, input/output level meters
  • Full-page preset browser: fourteen factory presets (from bare throat to buried in frost) plus user presets with author/description metadata, search and prev/next stepping
  • Undo/redo (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z); right-click any knob to reset it or type a value
  • Dark-fantasy themed GUI shared with Galdr, resizable, with tooltips on every control
  • Versioned session/preset state: settings saved today keep loading in future versions

Installation

Extract the archive for your platform, copy each plugin into the folder below, then rescan your plugins in the DAW. The standalone app needs no installation and runs from wherever you put it.

FormatWindowsmacOSLinux
VST3 C:\Program Files\Common Files\VST3 ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/VST3 ~/.vst3
CLAP C:\Program Files\Common Files\CLAP ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/CLAP ~/.clap
AU n/a ~/Library/Audio/Plug-Ins/Components n/a
Standalone run directly run directly run directly

Building from source

You need git, CMake ≥ 3.22 and a C++20 compiler (Visual Studio 2022 on Windows, Xcode on macOS, GCC or Clang on Linux).

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/andreademurtas/gala.git
cd gala
cmake -B build
cmake --build build --config Release

Builds end up in build/Gala_artefacts/Release/. On Linux, install the JUCE build dependencies first; the package list is in the README.

License

Gala is licensed under the GNU General Public License v3.0 or later. It is built on the JUCE framework (AGPLv3), uses the VST3 SDK interfaces distributed with JUCE (MIT), and clap-juce-extensions (MIT) for the CLAP build. Binary releases ship the relevant license texts in a licenses/ folder plus a NOTICE.txt with full attributions.

The GUI embeds UnifrakturMaguntia and IM Fell English, the same typefaces you are reading now, both under the SIL Open Font License.